CHICAGO — Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who began building a national profile four years ago by sharply cutting collective bargaining rights for most government workers, has turned his sights to a different element of the public sector: state universities.

As Mr. Walker takes steps toward announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, he and leaders in Wisconsin’s Republican-held Legislature have called for changes that would give a board largely picked by the governor far more control over tenure and curriculum in the University of Wisconsin System.

Critics said the proposal, which is championed by Republicans in the Legislature, would burnish Mr. Walker’s conservative credentials as he is scrutinized by likely primary voters.

As a new and unknown governor in 2011, Mr. Walker quickly drew national attention by announcing legislation to limit collective bargaining rights for most public-sector unions and require workers to pay more for their health care and pensions.

He followed that battle — which included surviving a recall effort — by signing other measures that attracted notice from conservatives nationally: new limits on early voting, the expansion of school vouchers and, this year, legislation barring unions from requiring employees in private workplaces to pay the equivalent of union dues.

Republicans say the new proposal will give university leaders more autonomy and encourage savings and efficiency at a moment when the state is aiming to cut spending to balance its budget. But the plan has caused professors to express alarm.

“It’ll be impossible for us to attract and retain people if we’re the only one that has such a weak protection of tenure,” said Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has been at the institution for 10 years and was among hundreds of faculty members in recent days to sign a letter opposing the changes.

A committee of lawmakers last week approved along party lines a proposal that would remove the notion of tenure in the university system from state statute, leaving the sensitive matter to the state’s Board of Regents, which oversees the system’s 13 four-year universities and some 180,000 students.

Under the proposal, the board’s 18 members — 16 of whom are appointed by the governor subject to the confirmation of the State Senate — would be permitted to set a standard by which they could fire a tenured faculty member “when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection,” not only in the case of just cause or a financial emergency, as permitted previously. Critics deemed it tenure with no actual promise of tenure.

“The reality is that we are not eliminating tenure,” said Senator Sheila Harsdorf, a Republican, adding that she believed the effort had been misunderstood as a broad condemnation of tenure.

Wisconsin is rare for including tenure provisions for professors in its statutes rather than in policies set by regents or similar boards. “We are directing the Board of Regents to develop a policy, just as there is in so many states,” Ms. Harsdorf said. “It’s just a matter of recognizing the ability for chancellors and campuses to administer and manage their operations.”

Along with tenure, “shared governance” has been a central feature of academic life in universities generally, giving faculty members the primary responsibility for decisions about matters like curriculum, choice of subject matter, instructional methods, faculty status and research. Under the proposed changes in Wisconsin, faculty members would still advise leaders on academic and educational activities, and on personnel matters, but that advice would be “subordinate” to the powers of the board, president and chancellors.

All of the changes still require a vote by the state’s full Senate and House. The proposal is expected to come to the full chambers later this month as part of the state’s budget for the next two years.

Education experts are calling the proposal significant.

“This is monumental in my opinion,” said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “My reading of the changes suggests that whatever the Board of Regents adopts as its policy on tenure and shared governance can’t possibly be as robust as what has been on the books thus far.”

Mr. Walker has called for still more sweeping changes to the state university system. As part of his budget proposal in February, the governor said he wanted to shift the entire university system out from under direct state oversight. He called for the creation of a “quasi-governmental” authority that could act on its own on issues of personnel, purchasing, capital projects and tuition. He also wanted to cut state spending on the system by about $300 million, or 13 percent, as part of his answer to an anticipated budget shortfall.

Wisconsin has hardly been the only place where public universities have struggled in relationships with their states, and leaders elsewhere have been closely watching the events unfold in Wisconsin. As state funding for higher education has dwindled in recent years, public universities in several states have been involved in discussions over cutting, or loosening, their ties with state government, so they would not have to comply with state regulations governing areas like purchasing and construction.

In negotiating over the budget in recent days, Wisconsin lawmakers rejected parts of Mr. Walker’s plan, including the creation of a separate authority to run the university system. They reduced to $250 million the cuts to the system. But they accepted other of his ideas.

A legislative committee voted on Friday to “keep several of the flexibilities Governor Walker originally proposed, including the specific proposal regarding tenure,” said Laurel Patrick, Mr. Walker’s spokeswoman, adding that Mr. Walker’s law limiting public-sector unions in 2011 had also eliminated tenure requirements in the school system. “Today, graduation rates are up, third-grade reading scores are up, and A.C.T. scores are second-best in the country.”

For years, Mr. Walker has been interested in changing the structure of the state’s public university system. Mr. Walker, who did not complete college and has a son who attends the Madison campus, is expected to announce his presidential run shortly after the state’s budget is approved.

On Thursday, some leaders of the Board of Regents, meeting in Milwaukee, said the board was committed to tenure, and had already planned a task force to examine how to proceed if the proposals are enacted.

“We are as a board and always have been and always will be supportive of tenure,” Regina Millner, the regents’ vice president, said in an interview. “Our commitment to tenure, our commitment to academic freedom, our commitment to a strong faculty with secure support for the work they do, it’s absolute.”

Yet in academic circles nationwide, there was concern this week that the proposed changes in Wisconsin could bolster the forces pushing universities to operate more like businesses, eliminating departments or courses that do not attract many students or much research money.

“Increasingly, the excuse of financial difficulty has been used as a reason to overpower the faculty, with a lot of people in administration saying we need to be flexible,” said Henry Reichman, vice president of the American Association of University Professors. “If you just took the Wisconsin language on eliminating tenure, and moved it from the statute into board policy, you could argue that there would be no problem. But the shared governance change seems to undermine the whole structure.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Unions Subdued, Walker Turns to Tenure at Wisconsin Colleges. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe